Leonardo's assessment of the shoulder took four minutes and involved a level of professional detachment that Trent had come to associate with how the man approached everything — complete focus, no performative concern, the information organized before the verdict was delivered.
"Shallow," Leonardo said. "The bolt skipped along the trapezius rather than embedding. You'll have a scar." He cleaned it with wine, which stung in the specific way of things that were working correctly, and bound it with strips cut from workshop canvas. "You need to not use that arm for three days."
"Two."
"Three." He tied the last knot with the finality of a man who'd learned not to argue about physics. "The muscle needs to rest or the wound reopens. Reopened wounds in Venice become infected wounds. Infected wounds are considerably more disruptive to your operational timeline than three days of rest."
Federico, from his position against the wall, said nothing. He'd retrieved the gondola from the secondary channel and pulled the water door closed with the care of someone tidying up after an event they intended to file as complete, and now he was watching with the expression he'd developed for moments when Leonardo was right and saying so out loud would add nothing.
The bells outside had been going for an hour. Different patterns — some time-keeping, some alert, some that Trent had learned to read over the preceding months as the Barbarigo compound's internal communication system bleeding into the city's broader sound.
[ENEMY COUNTER-OPERATION — ACTIVE. DISTRICT LOCKDOWN: INITIATED. MOVEMENT RISK: SEVERE. ESTIMATED DURATION: 2-4 WEEKS.]
Two to four weeks. He filed that alongside the shoulder assessment and the sound of the bells and the operational reality that the next phase of the Venice campaign had just become stationary.
"Three days," he said.
Leonardo allowed this to constitute agreement and went back to his work.
The lockdown was professional in the way that indicated money rather than improvisation.
Marco and Carlo sealed the Castello district borders by noon. By evening, canal checkpoints had appeared at the four primary junctions leading out from the Barbarigo compound's surrounding neighborhood — not city guard checkpoints, the Barbarigos' own mercenaries, operating with the confidence of men who knew the difference between official authority and the kind that paid better. Unknown faces were questioned. Gondoliers were required to declare cargo and passenger manifests at two new points that hadn't existed the day before. The rooftop routes that Antonio's thieves used for the majority of their communication went dark within six hours of Emilio's death being formally announced.
Antonio's note arrived through the building's front entrance rather than the canal door — a small adjustment that communicated more than its content. Two of my people were taken for questioning. Both released. Neither spoke. I am telling you so you know the cost and can account for it. We hold position.
Trent read it, burned it in the lamp, wrote back: Understood. Hold. We do the same.
Marco Ferro spent the first day organizing the workshop's storage with the focused energy of a man who needed to do something physical and had identified a project of sufficient scope. The result was better storage organization than the workshop had had since they arrived — everything accessible, everything labeled, two more exits identified that hadn't been catalogued. He reported this as a matter of fact rather than accomplishment, which meant he was learning how to work in confined spaces without making it a psychological event.
Renato ran the same map review he ran every morning, updated the Barbarigo infrastructure tracking with what the lockdown itself revealed — the checkpoint positions showed where the brothers considered their network's edges to be — and produced a revised assessment of the compound's internal guard structure based on movement patterns visible from the workshop's second-floor window. He'd been doing this without being asked, because it was what needed doing.
Both of them, Trent thought, watching Renato mark the map with the deliberate care of a man who'd once been paid to notice threats and had never lost the habit. Both of them just doing it.
Federico paced until the second day, at which point he apparently reached an internal agreement with himself about the utility of pacing and stopped. He found the workshop's oldest piece of salvageable wood and spent the rest of that day turning it into something that had the general shape of a sparring target, which he then practiced against with the one-sided technique he'd been developing since Venice made two-on-two sparring geometrically inadvisable.
The shoulder prevented Trent from joining him. He reviewed ledger entries and wrote Lorenzo's monthly report and thought about the problem of three weeks in a box.
The ledger discovery happened on the fourth day.
Leonardo had been working through Grimaldi's private accounting book with the systematic attention he gave to anything that contained encoded information — not for operational reasons initially, but because he'd noticed a notation system in the margins that used a different hand from Grimaldi's main cipher. A second author, or a second purpose.
The sketches were on folded paper tucked into the ledger's back cover, the kind of thing that looked like workshop drawings to anyone who didn't know what they were looking at.
Leonardo knew what they were looking at.
He sat with the papers for a long time before he said anything. Trent noticed the silence — it was different from Leonardo's working silence, which had a quality of active engagement even without sound. This was the silence of a man processing something he hadn't been prepared for.
"These are mine," Leonardo said finally.
Trent crossed the workshop. The drawings were mechanical — a catapult mechanism, but modified. A battering device with a novel joint system. Three different iterations of a wheel-and-lever configuration that Trent recognized from a sketchbook Leonardo had shown him in February 1476, over a year ago, in the workshop in Florence where this had all started.
"You're certain."
"The proportion method is specific to how I draft initial concepts. No one else draws the wheel ratios this way." Leonardo's voice was careful and controlled, the kind of control that meant the thing underneath it had weight. "They acquired my design notes. Copied the methodology. And then—" He indicated three specific modifications. "—made them into something I would not have made."
War machines. The modifications had turned an engineering sketch into an operational weapon design — the kind of optimization that required knowing what you wanted to use something for before you modified it. Someone had taken Leonardo da Vinci's intellectual process and fed it toward destruction.
"How long ago?" Trent said.
"The paper is consistent with the sketches I produced in early 1475. Before we met." Leonardo folded the papers carefully — not putting them away, handling them. "I worked briefly for a Florentine merchant that year who expressed interest in my mechanical concepts. I didn't know his affiliations." A pause. "I didn't ask."
The Templar network. Trade contacts, banking connections, intellectual asset acquisition — the same methodology that had pulled the Pazzi into conspiracy and the Barbarigos into Venice's corruption was apparently also running a research program. Twenty years of it, probably. Buying ideas before the people who had them understood what they were selling.
"This stays between us," Trent said.
Leonardo looked at him.
"Not because I'm dismissing it. Because if it becomes common knowledge in this workshop, it becomes something Federico and Renato and Marco need to process, and they don't have the context to process it cleanly. I need everyone's attention on getting through three weeks, not on the implications of what we found."
"And after three weeks?"
"After three weeks, we address it." He looked at the sketches. "What do you need from me to understand what they've built?"
Leonardo considered. "The full ledger. Time. And access to Antonio's intelligence on Barbarigo warehouse contents — specifically anything described as materials not consistent with standard trade goods."
"You'll have it."
Leonardo nodded and put the sketches in his coat pocket, which meant he was going to think about them continuously and say nothing about them in company, which was what Trent had asked for and which Leonardo apparently understood without it being specified.
Federico snored. This was information Trent hadn't had before the lockdown, because before the lockdown they'd occupied separate rooms. Now they didn't, and the sound had a particular rhythm — not disruptive exactly, but present in the way that a clock is present, marking time whether you want it to or not.
Leonardo talked in his sleep on the third night. Mathematics, or something that sounded like mathematics — proportions and ratios, the particular cadence of someone calculating without knowing they were doing it. Federico slept through it. Renato slept through everything, with the completeness of a soldier who'd learned to take rest when it was available. Marco woke at every unusual canal sound for the first week and gradually stopped, which was its own kind of adaptation to the city's rhythms.
Three weeks, in the end. The lockdown contracted and loosened in stages — first the canal checkpoints, then the rooftop routes, then the general movement restriction — as Marco and Carlo's mercenaries exhausted the initial surge of response energy and shifted into a sustained security posture that was expensive to maintain and showed in their faces when Antonio's thieves started moving again.
Antonio's note, through the canal door on the morning of day twenty-two: They're settling into watch-mode. Festival announcement coming. Carlo will speak publicly. The rooftops are ours again.
Trent read it in the doorway with morning light on the canal, shoulder fully healed, three weeks of confinement converting into forward momentum.
"Renato," he said. "Pull the map."
Renato already had it.
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